67 Quotes About Identity-politics

Wherever it takes disaster to unite, politics generally divide: and in eras of intense uncertainty, a nation's people retreat into the tribes in which they feel the most secure.

The tension between people is palpable, and the ideal of what it means to be and look American becomes a preoccupation to folks around the country, including me.

Bitter struggles deform their participants in subtle, complicated ways. The idea that one should speak one's cultural allegiance first and the truth second (and that this is a sign of authenticity) is precisely such a deformation.

... The great fallacy at the heart of today’s political correctitude—that in order to secure something vaguely termed ‘diversity’ it insists on something definitely recognizable as conformity.

Arguments for slavery weren't pragmatic or ethical discussions about the realities of slavery; they were assertions about abstract identities (The Slave, The Slave Owner, The Abolitionist) and performances of loyalty to the South. They were demagoguery.

When political strategists argue that the Republican Party is missing a huge chance to court the black community, they are thinking of this mostly male bloc—the old guy in the barbershop, the grizzled Pop Warner coach, the retired Vietnam vet, the drunk uncle at the family reunion. He votes Democratic, not out of any love for abortion rights or progressive taxation, but because he feels—in fact, he knows—that the modern-day GOP draws on the support of people who hate him.

An important ethical function of identity politics, in this context, is to highlight that obstacles to the self-development of individuals, and to the formation and exercise of their agency, emerge in complex cultural and psychic forms, as well as through more familiar kinds of socio-economic inequality.

[T]he insight of the identity politics of empathy: that all of us struggle under the weight of the insecurity epidemic, and all of us must be welcome in the movements to take it on.

Discovering that I was adopted redefined my entire world, but it taught me that who you are doesn't change.